Job Market Paper

Committee members: Margaret Christ (chair), Shane Dikolli, Jacqueline Hammersley, Jessica Rodell, and Kristy Towry

ABSTRACT: I examine whether firms can cultivate employee curiosity using informal controls—specifically, stated organizational values and leader role modeling—and how curiosity, in turn, influences creative performance. Although firms value creativity, they often struggle to improve it. Drawing from prior research, I argue that stimulating cognitive processes that underpin creativity—such as curiosity, the focus of my study—may be more effective than targeting creative performance directly. Using an experiment, I find that stated values reliably and significantly increase curiosity, while the effects of leader role modeling are more nuanced. I also find that curiosity expressed in a setting unrelated to performance significantly improves creative performance by increasing the number of ideas that are both effective and uncommon. This improvement appears to arise from curiosity prompting deeper engagement with the problem space (yielding more effective ideas) and fostering more flexible and fluent thinking (yielding more uncommon ideas). These findings contribute to research on the antecedents of creativity and offer insight into how firms can enhance creative outcomes by designing controls that foster the precursors (e.g., curiosity) to creativity rather than focusing narrowly on the creative outcome.  

Conditionally Accepted to The Accounting Review

with Tina Carpenter and Margaret Christ

ABSTRACT: The traditional apprenticeship model, characterized by a top-down flow of knowledge from experienced auditors to their less experienced counterparts, may implicitly discourage upward knowledge sharing. However, in today’s technology-focused environment, there is great potential for upward knowledge sharing as audits are increasingly reliant on technology knowledge which does not necessarily accrue with auditor tenure and is thus likely held more with junior auditors than supervisor auditors. Through interviews, we explore factors that enhance and inhibit junior auditors’ upward knowledge sharing. Using social status theory as a lens for understanding our data, three themes emerge. First, audit quality is enhanced when audit teams blend technology acumen, more prevalent among junior auditors, with senior auditors' deep accounting expertise. Second, there are roadblocks and conflicts that inhibit junior auditors from sharing knowledge upwards. Finally, while roadblocks exist, champions emerge on successful teams to pave the way for upward knowledge sharing ultimately enhancing audit quality.

Working Paper under review at an Academic Journal

with Tina Carpenter, Margaret Christ, and Emily Deng

ABSTRACT: Knowledge sharing is a powerful component of organizational success.  However, in a hierarchical structure, a supervisor’s resistance to receiving knowledge from their subordinates can stifle knowledge sharing, negatively impacting organizations’ performance. Overcoming the deeply ingrained power imbalance resulting from hierarchy is essential for facilitating effective knowledge sharing and fully leveraging the team's diverse expertise and perspectives. Accordingly, we use an experiment to explore upward knowledge sharing within the supervisor-subordinate relationship and examine how supervisors respond when they receive knowledge shared from their subordinate. We draw on power dependency theory to predict and find that supervisors respond more negatively to upward knowledge sharing when they have overlapping expertise with their subordinates. However, we also provide good news in that we find that when supervisors who have overlapping expertise receive subordinate-contingent incentives (i.e., those dependent on subordinates’ performance), rather than incentives only linked to their individual performance, they respond more positively to upward knowledge sharing when evaluating their subordinates’ performance. In contrast, we find that supervisors who have overlapping expertise and individual incentives effectively punish their subordinates with lower performance ratings for sharing knowledge upward. Finally, we predict and find that subordinates condition their choice to share knowledge upward based on their supervisor’s reaction, highlighting the importance of the supervisor’s behavior in shaping collaboration within the team.

Working Paper

with Henry Eyring and Patrick J. Ferguson

ABSTRACT: We study the role of ‘cooling off’ after receipt of relative performance information (RPI) as a means of altering RPI’s performance effects. On one hand, cooling off may dissipate people’s immediate and potent affective response to feedback. This could decrease motivation and effort, thereby lowering the positive performance effects of RPI. On the other hand, cooling off may allow people to reflect and respond more deliberately to feedback. This could facilitate learning and effective allocation of effort, thereby enhancing the positive performance effects of RPI. Using a field experiment in an online education setting, we find support for the latter: RPI on average boosts academic grades, and this benefit is significantly larger for those students whom we expose to design friction that makes cooling off between receiving RPI and subsequent action more likely. Students exposed to the design friction and those who are not take a similar number of actions, but those exposed are significantly more accurate in their problem attempts. Our evidence suggests that this benefit stems from the cooling off period following receipt of RPI, which enables these students to allocate effort more productively and identify best practices that bring about more effective performance. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the benefits of cooling off are concentrated among low-performing men. Our findings extend research on the performance effects of RPI and illustrate how behavioral economic theory on design frictions can improve the design of feedback systems. 

Work in Progress

with Ian Matthews, Wioleta Olczak, and Ryan Sommerfeldt

Work in Progress

with Nicole Donahoo and Christine Nielsen

Work in Progress

with Margaret Christ, Marcy Shepardson, and Tamara Lambert